Tag Archives: Conferences

Last September (2-4 Sept) I was pleased to be able to attend the CILIP Rare Books & Special Collections Group conference in London. I had intended to blog about this straight away, but was struck down with appendicitis the following week, and have only now got the time to do so.

I had been invited to speak about the Cardiff Rare Books Collection, housed in SCOLAR and acquired from the Public Library in 2010. The theme of the conference was “Hidden collections revealed” and this covered topics from retrospective cataloguing, to private libraries, and embargoed collections to active promotion. The conference took place over three days and in three different venues – Friend’s House, Lambeth Palace, and the British Library. This allowed attendees the opportunity to have tours of the libraries in these places, although as places were limited not everyone got to see everywhere (myself included).

The first day began with an overview from Karen Attar(Senate House Library) on the (then forthcoming) Directory of rare books and special collections in the UK and Republic of Ireland. This is the third edition of the directory, previous editions appeared in 1985 and 1997. Attar is the editor and initially emailed potential contributors in 2014 asking for updates to their previous entries, or for new entries if they had not appeared before. The team in SCOLAR were able to compile an extensive update to the Cardiff entry to reflect all the changes and acquisitions we have had since 1997. Overall the book will be important to make people aware of different collections across the UK.

Following on from this David Prosser (RLUK) talked about the survey of hidden collections that took place in 2010. There were 77 respondents to the survey, it seemed that smaller libraries didn’t have the time or the manpower to respond. The survey also revealed that there were degrees of hidden, some were uncatalogued, some had card catalogues or printed catalogues. Modern problems of digitised materials were also highlighted. How long will these be available on line? Apparently 20% has already been lost to the web, creating a 21st century black hole of material.

The second session of the day focussed on uncatalogued material, and a variety of projects designed to combat this problem. Dunia Garcia-Ontiveros (The London Library) discussed a project they had been running from 1999, which had been revitalised when she took up her position there in 2007 and ensured that records were upgraded with material in hand. Previously they had just been importing records to improve what they had, since 2007 they have been able to add local detail such as provenance, bookplates, annotations etc. The project has highlighted the significance of not only what they knew they had, but all the extras associated with it.

Next, Darryl Green (St. Andrews) talked about the Lighting the Past project at St. Andrews. The initial stages of the project revealed that only 25% of their special collections were catalogued, as opposed to the 50% they had previously thought. Quantifying this to the institution meant that there were 150,000 uncatalogued rare books, and at their former rate of cataloguing this would have taken them 75 years to complete. They looked at a variety of ways to deal with this problem and this resulted in Lighting the Past. Student workers have been employed for the first phase of the project – giving them employment and training in specialist skills. The second phase will involve Rare books cataloguers upgrading records to full DCRM(B) standards.

Another project in Scotland was discussed by Elizabeth Quarmby Lawrence (Edinburgh University), they had difference circumstances to St. Andrews, and their approach was to have two paid internships, for two days a week for nine months (Feb-Oct 2014) – this offered opportunity and experience for the individuals. Training started with easier material and progressed onto more difficult material. The internships were a rounded experience, and included working on blogs, events, student liaison, and exhibitions. The training scheme was a great success, and one of the interns has now been employed in the rare books cataloguing department.

The second day of the conference was at Lambeth Palace (where our former colleague Ken Gibb now works). The third conference session was about being open for research and had sessions from libraries that are not necessarily open to the public. Martin Cherry (Freemason’s Library) talked about the history, and the use and access to the Library and Museum of Freemasonry which was first established in 1837 by the Grand Lodge. Originally access was restricted to Freemasons but is now open to all.

Next we heard about military libraries from John Pearce (Deputy Librarian, The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst). Defence libraries are not regimental museums, they deal with material on the MOD, technical material etc. So why are there rare books in defence libraries? These are historical training manuals, and operational requirements, acquired for specific purposes at the time of publication – and now useful for the history of military education. With these libraries there is a restriction to access, as they are ‘behind the wire’ – but they do have a web presence to a certain extent, and they are beginning to digitise some material at Sandhurst.

To close this session we then heard about the Association of Pal Mall Libraries from Kay Walters (The Athenaeum), Sian Prosser (Royal Astronomical Society), and Renae Satterley (Middle Temple Library). The Association of Pall Mall Libraries was set up so that solo librarians could get to share knowledge and resources. The libraries range from private members clubs to societies, and the library collections range in size from 2K – 100K; some are research resources, some historical assets. There is a mixture of qualified and nonqualified staff running the libraries.

The final session of this day looked at collections that were ‘under wraps’ and included my own paper Collating and curating for the public: the Cardiff rare books collection which demonstrated the change in priorities at the Public Library, which went from actively acquiring rare and manuscript materials at the beginning of the 20th century for the public to use, to ‘hiding’ them away in stores and discarding them by the start of the 21st century.

In this session Helen Potter (FOI Centre, National Archives) discussed closed records at The National Archives, and issues surrounding the right to know vs right to privacy. There are a number of reasons why records might be closed, which might be to do with specific individuals (personal case files, e.g. prisoner files, naturalisation 1938-1945, criminal prosecution). Or the files might be closed because they are distressing and disturbing (rape, assault, mental distress). They are currently operating on the following principle – ‘release what we can, protect what we must’.

After lunch, there were guided tours of Lambeth Palace library, and then the rest of the afternoon was devoted to a variety of visits to special collections within London. Participants could sign up to two visits, and there was a bit of tube co-ordination required! I chose two places that were next to one another, and coincidentally not that far from Lambeth Palace either! My first visit was to the Print Rooms at Tate Britain; we were shown prints by a variety of artists, and some of Turner’s sketch books. We also got to see Beatrix Potter’s drawings for The Tailor of Gloucester. My second visit was to Chelsea College of Arts to see their Artists’ books collection – it was interesting to compare their collection with the one at Cardiff Metropolitan University that I had visited earlier in the year.

The final day took place at the British Library Conference Centre, and the first session looked at promoting collections. Adrian Edwards (Head of Printed Heritage Collections, British Library) talked about the potential of exhibitions to bring hidden collections into the lime-light, and focussed on a specific example of the ‘Comics unmasked’ exhibition which was held in 2014.

He highlighted that the objective of exhibitions are wider than what you see in the gallery. For example with this collection initially the material was spread over different sites and wasn’t catalogued consistently, if at all. However, due to the exhibition many comics got catalogued – the power of the exhibition gave leverage to the cataloguing priorities. They were able to convince the data quality team to see the cataloguing of the comics as a training opportunity – serials, complexities etc. Now all the material is available on one site, is used more, and the rare material has been moved to higher level of secured storage. In addition staff expertise has improved; some have given papers at academic conferences.

Next was Lara Haggerty (Innerpeffray Library). Innerpeffray library is five miles from the nearest town, and a bus only comes once a week, the library is essentially in the middle of nowhere. It was the first free public lending library in Scotland, set up in 1680. Originally in the loft of the chapel it started with 400 books. In 1968 they stopped lending books, there was a decline after the First World War, and there were other libraries in nearby towns, and the library began to disappear from people’s awareness.

By 2001 things were not looking too good: “We can no longer open the door and hope”

In 2009 Lara Haggerty was appointed as Library keeper and marketing manager, the 31st library keeper there has been. She created a business plan to raise visitors by 100% – quite a challenge! She highlighted that they were selling something different, a unique experience for the visitor. As part of this they have partnered up with local businesses, and they now hold events, like gin tasting in the library (!), and “How far would you walk for a book” walk, etc.

The final talk of this session was by Katie Sambrook (Kings College London) who talked about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office library collection at King’s College London. There are 100,000 items in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office library collection, mainly books, but manuscripts as well, covering 16th-21st centuries, with the heart of the collection from 1750-1950. There were difficulties for the library when it was situated in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with security, couldn’t bring in lap tops, etc, so it was transferred to an appropriate academic institution. They have needed to catalogue all items from scratch, book in hand, and have about half done at the moment. They think that the catalogue is the best way of advertising the books, but have also promoted the collection by an exhibition space and online. They have used targeted promotion, picking a country or area, and found that even just a poster on library gates brought people in.

The last three talks were in a session that looked at going ‘beyond the library’, firstly Katharine Hogg (Foundling Museum) talked about the Gerald Coke Handel Collection at the Foundling Museum. Gerald Coke was a banker and in the 1930s started to collect Handel material – he chose Handel because he was first published in England and at available prices (Mozart was too expensive!). He was a generous collector and let scholars use the material even though he kept it at home, and he did have a house catalogue. The collection came to the Museum with an endowment, and although not quite a lending collection now, a database of the collection is now online.

Hannah Manktelow, a PhD student, talked about her research discovering provincial Shakespeare with the British Library Playbill collection. The collection contains playbills from the provinces as well as London, and much of what we know about theatrical history comes from playbills – when/where/who/what. The bulk of playbills date from 1780-1880. As there are 75,000 provincial playbills, to manage the project she picked five provincial towns – Newcastle, Nottingham, Norwich, Bath and Brighton. She decided to focuss on England for a national representation. She has been looking at where Shakespeare was performed (theatres, portable venues, etc); Who performed (a resident company, London stars, touring company. Bath received double the amount of stars than Newcastle – closer to London and very fashionable); and also when – what percent of the theatrical season.

One discovery has been that regional Shakespeare was more avant-garde, and had the first black performer in Othello, he was very famous, but not accepted to play in London until the end of his career.

The final talk of the session and the conference was by Mark Byford, a private collector of rare books. He has been a collector for 12-15 years, and has a focus on Tudor and Jacobean books, but not a limit on subjects. There are about 1000 books in his collection. There is no catalogue of his collection, but he does allow people to visit to look at, or to take out, books. Access is dependent on collector/owner, personal contacts, but Byford believes he knows his books better than a librarian would (possibly).

Overall the conference was fascinating, lots of wonderful collections were talked about and we got to visit some great venues, and see some collections we wouldn’t necessarily get the chance to. The only downside for me was that because the conference was spread over three venues there was no central ‘conference venue’ or accommodation. As a non-Londoner there was a bit of stress in trying to work out a) where to stay, and b) how to get to each venue each day. In addition there was no one place where all attendees were together outside of scheduled events (i.e. no conversations at breakfast, or hanging around the bar together at the end of the evening event). But it was an interesting way of holding a conference, and I managed not to get lost more than once!

This September I spent three days in Canterbury, at the University of Kent, attending the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group conference. Held every two years the CIG conference is an ideal opportunity for cataloguers and those working with metadata to get together. The theme this year was the impact of metadata and a variety of sessions arose looking at different aspects. Over the three days we looked at the Impact of metadata standards, the Impact on the organisation, the Impact of metadata on users, and the Impact of metadata professionals. There were formal papers, lightning talks and a poster session; as well as a couple of optional tours at the end of the conference which I also managed to attend. Plus the best freebies I have so far received in a conference goody bag – including a fridge magnet of cataloguing words!

Impact of metadata standards

The ‘hot’ new metadata standard to be talked about these days is ‘Linked Data’ and the conference got off to a sizzling start with Thomas Meehan from University College London talking about Bibframe – which is the Library of Congress’ replacement for MARC and is based on linked data. If you want to know what Linked Data is you should look at Tim Berners-Lee’s four principles of linked data, which Meehan referred to. Unlike MARC, Linked data is not a cataloguing or library standard, it is greater than that and assumes an openness. MARC is difficult to share outside of the library world which is one reason why Linked data is seen as the future. Various libraries have published linked data, such as the Swedish National Library, German National Library and Cambridge University Library, whilst the British Library has been using it for the British National Bibliography (BNB).

The session moved on to Chris Biggs (Open University) who talked about OUDA – the Open University Digital Archive which will contain all the digital content from the OU from the last 45 years, including video, audio etc. He discussed the problems they faced including extracting metadata from a number of places, how not everything was catalogued in the past, how AV and text records were inconsistent, the standards that have changed or are partial, and how material has changed over the years with different carriers (broadcasts, videos, DVDs, digital files). Biggs detailed some of the processes they went through using MarcEdit, and the challenges they faced. So far the changes have been made in their LMS and are not yet in OUDA – but eventually all the data will be in OUDA and the discoverability will be better than with their LMS.

After a break Duncan Chalmers from Coutts gave a brief talk about RDA (Resource Description and Access) and using it with two metadata formats (MARC and Linked data). He pointed out that ‘metadata’ as a concept doesn’t figure in a user’s workflow, and that when people are used to searching for information on the web when they come into a library they notice when their searching on the library catalogue doesn’t work as well.

Following on from this Alan Danskin of the British Library took a very focussed look at certain rules within the RDA toolkit that need rethinking. His talk RDA and the cascading vortex of horror looked at a chain of instructions cataloguers would get sucked into when certain information was not available on an item; and he suggested some possible changes.

Impact on the organisation

The second day started with a very interesting talk from Laura Williams of the BBC who talked about embedded Media Managers who work alongside other staff at the BBC to capture and archive metadata. She looked primarily at TV metadata which is generated by film crews, and production teams. If the right information is not collated it has a knock on effect – for instance a programme synopsis won’t go into the Radio Times; or the cataloguers are unable to add the item to the archive. Williams also mentioned a couple of projects that are ongoing – the ‘Stockshop’ project which looks at which generated images might have value outside the use they were created for, or which have the potential to be used by someone else – for instance a view over London from a helicopter.

Next up was Natasha Aburrow-Jones from EDINA looking at the impact of metadata within SUNCAT (Serials union catalogue). Originating as a project in 2003, SUNCAT was fully launched in 2005 and there are now 100 contributing libraries which range from large national libraries to small specialised libraries; from Inverness to Cornwall, and includes one in Antarctica! They accept data in almost any format and quite surprisingly with ranging quality of metadata (it is bewildering how/why people submit records which don’t even have titles!). The impact of the (non) use of data standards leads to a lack of consistency and non-matching with other records. They are currently designing a new in-house algorithm for matching metadata with “a multi dimensional radial match” .

Following on from this was a paper by Arwen Caddy who works in a corporate library for the company Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare. You probably won’t recognize the company name, but would certainly know the products – ranging from Gaviscon to Durex. About 4,000 books make up a small part of the research and development library, alongside a state of the art archive. This is a ‘Dim archive’ – meaning that it is a controlled repository which locks down documents so they can’t be tampered with; and they have permission from the CLA to store and give out papers to a select audience. By ‘locking down’ documents they are maintaining the integrity of the originals, regulating authentification and providing a trusted, non-tampered with copy (remember this is the corporate world!). However, once the documents have entered the archive you can’t correct any mistakes – if you upload it to the wrong folder, that’s it, it has to stay there; if any errata are published you have to upload a whole new version as well; embarrassing mistakes stay on the catalogue. Caddy provided some tips on how to avoid mistakes; these included taking responsibility in the approval process and learning where mistakes were likely to happen, concentrating, and getting into a rhythm. There were a variety of other pitfalls in the process including confusions about chapter authors and book editors, and dates to file by (year the paper was accepted or the year it was published). She also provided some very good advice when dealing with her users: If you can’t always be right, be helpful!

Impact of metadata on users

The afternoon session looked at the impact of metadata on users. This included lightning talks on social media by Claire Sewell (Cambridge), which focussed on the use of Pinterest particularly in relation to their library science collection; Improving subject based metadata for LGBTQ related young adult books by Ruth Jenkins, a library school student; and enhancing the user experience and promoting bibliographic services at De Montfort University by Lynne Dyer. Alongside these were a paper by Anne Welsh (lecturer at University College London) which discussed metadata output and its impact on researchers. She identified four user tasks of finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining. Whilst the ‘searching’ process is something that librarians are good at improving, there are problems at times with getting an ‘output’.

Impact of metadata professionals

The final morning looked at metadata professionals, and started with a paper by Deborah Lee from the Courtauld Institute of Art focussing on training new cataloguers to use RDA, when they have never used AACR2 – in contrast to all the conversion training that has been occurring for cataloguers who are used to one set of rules and now face a new set. Although training from scratch in RDA took a bit longer than training in AACR2 (due to relationship entities); on the whole, the beginner cataloguers didn’t have the same issues as established cataloguers because this is all they have known. Lee’s training programme did highlight the impact of local policies, and she emphasised the need to ensure that not only were these people trained to do the job in hand (and satisfy local requirements), but also that they were equipped with the skills to be excellent general cataloguers with the ability to do the job well elsewhere.

There were two talks from staff at the University of Kent looking at the changes, improvements and challenges they have been facing over the last few years. At one point they had enormous backlogs of items waiting to be catalogued and undertook a three year strategy to simplify and streamline services; this included establishing standard classification, RFID tagging core and main stock, and introducing shelf-ready. They worked to improve discoverability before they implemented their resource discovery tool. One of the talks was by two metadata assistants who had been recruited during this process and had come from non-academic library backgrounds and had brought fresh view points to the team.

The morning also included a paper from Celine Carty (Cambridge) entitled Holistic cataloguing, or the fundamental interconnectednessof all things which provided some reflection on managing cataloguing projects and being aware of the impact on other teams. Whilst the cataloguing team may be improving their workflow, what about the people who may be processing or shelving the books – can they cope with an increased workflow, or are they involved in different projects? The key theme was ‘communication’ and she emphasised the need to speak to everyone – not just line managers, but all staff.

At the end of the conference there was the chance to participate in some visits, and since I had planned to stay in the area for a few days and didn’t have to rush off to catch a train, I was able to do both visits on offer. Firstly I went on a tour of the University of Kent’s special collections; they house the British cartoon archive and have an extensive theatre collection, and were kind enough to put out some great displays representing many of their collections. Finally I went to see the Canterbury Cathedral library, which felt like going behind scenes at the cathedral. They house several parish collections including a ‘library in a cupboard’; and over 30,000 pre 1900 items.

Overall I had a great experience during the three days; I gained a lot from all the papers, managed to catch up with a few people, had my first proper attempt at tweeting from a conference, and was pleased that there was a greater representation from Wales than the last time. Apologies if I have misrepresented anyone’s talk, and also if I haven’t mentioned you (purely down to space – it was all great!).

Post-conference I stayed on in the area for a few days and even managed to find Bagpuss’ shop!

Tweets from the conference have been collected in Storify, the slides will be made available on the CILIP CIG webpages, and papers published in the CIG journal later this year.

Although I am sure others will blog about #CIG12 in a more indepth manner* I just wanted to express my delight about the excellent conference that took place earlier this week in Sheffield. Two days packed full of thought provoking presentations, 25 speakers and just over 100 attendees; at times my brain was hurting, and I felt weighed down with concern about the things I didn’t know but really should; whilst at other moments I felt proud to be a cataloguer, and inspired to tackle new things.

There were four themed sessions spread out over the two days; Working with new standards, Working co-operatively, New challenges for cataloguers; and Developing working practices. RDA, as to be expected, was a key issue to be talked about. Celine Carty brought us updates from the ALA conference, and managed to succinctly condense 5 days into one talk. It was extremely useful hearing about the view from across the pond, and she also gave us a great handout of links too!

There was quite a contrast between this conference and the last CIG conference in 2010 with

Keen attendees ready & waiting

attitudes to RDA, from what I can remember of two years ago, most people in the room weren’t really sure about how they would be tackling RDA, and were waiting for guidance from someone else. This time round a good 50% of the audience were actively preparing for RDA, were devising training sessions for their staff (or looking for online material they could use), or were very aware of what work they had to do. I also don’t think that anyone in the room was thinking of it as ‘Retirement Day Approaching’. Celine Carty passed on some take home messages; things like “its now when not if” and “evolution not revolution”, she also commented that actually it can be quite good not to be the trailblazers. While the rules are still being refined, and problems still being ironed out, its quite nice to be able to learn from what is happening in the US. Stuart Hunt also gave us some food for thought in his session on ‘Implementing RDA in your ILS’, and pointed out that as well as us cataloguers having to get our heads round RDA, that we also had a lot of communication work to do – we need to talk to system vendors, and record supply agencies, colleagues who work on the front line and those who are library management. We also need to consider whether our systems are ready for RDA, there are new fields, will they display or be indexed, will there be problems loading data into the system etc etc. Anne Welsh & Katharine White also reminded us that there is always change, and we already have hybrid systems. We need to accept that there never was a better time to embrace RDA, although we should question everything; and that standards, materials, and even students are always evolving.

Conference venue – Halifax Hall

Although RDA was casting a big shadow over us, there were plenty of other topics to discuss too. Deborah Lee introduced the idea of the proposed UK NACO funnel, a project to collaborate on creating authority files. Traditionally a funnel is managed by one person which is a huge commitment, and there can be delay in training new members to join; this current project however is aiming for a cascade of training and aims to get as many participants acting independently as soon as possible with a critical mass of people who are happy to train others. It will be a great professional development opportunity for anyone who gets involved.

As we are probably all aware we are in the midst of a time of many challenges for cataloguers, as Heather Jardine noted – ‘change is the new normal’. We are having to face restructuring and streamlining, changes in roles, as well as changes in rules and materials. There were several presentations demonstrating how various cataloguers are adapting to these challenges including Helen Williams’ overview of ‘transforming a bibliographic services team from copy cataloguers to metadata creators’. Her team have had a growing involvement in their institutional repository LSERO; with a review of workflows, additional training and comprehensive documentation the team have become multi-skilled, and better future-proofed.

Shelf-ready reared its ugly head towards the end of the conference (sorry, I admit I am not a fan!). What still stood out for me, (and is one of my biggest problems with the whole shelf ready thing), was the standard of records being supplied – the poor quality, wrong classmarks, e-book records for print records, etc etc and even some poor processing. What kind of service do vendors think they are providing? And since so many of us are guilty of ‘smug tweaking’* why aren’t there more ‘good’ records available?

CIG do great bags!

I haven’t mentioned everybody who talked, but would like to say I gained something from every speaker; I’m not a fan of cricket but really enjoyed hearing abut the Marylebone Cricket Club library courtesy of Neil Robinson, and the challenges he faced with revamping a bespoke classification system (and his corridor of uncertainty); and even though I’m not a fan of shelf-ready I appreciated hearing about experiences from Sheffield with Emily Bogie, and Warwick with Christina Claridge. And I really should mention the High visibility cataloguing blog and Cat23 – a project I’m keen to hear more about.

The conference was great, the people were great, and as a tiny aside I was extremely pleased with the range of cold/soft drinks available at break times! I don’t drink tea/coffee, and wouldn’t expect more than a glass of water to be offered (don’t even get that sometimes), so a multitude of fridges with a variety of beverages made me very happy! The cakes were good too…

I also really liked that there weren’t any parallel sessions – so I got to hear everybody; and the concept of having lightning round talks was good too. Ten minute snippets of projects and ideas, although shame-facedly I over ran in my own sessions and got flashed the ‘red card’.

Break time

My only regret is that I didn’t get to talk to some people who are Twitter contacts (we need Twitter icons/names on our badges!); however, I did talk to people who I didn’t previously know, and that is always a good thing. I’m looking forward to the next CIG conference already!

I’d never been to a CILIP Career Development Group conference before this summer, probably because I’m not a member of CDG so hadn’t paid much attention to their conferences before now; but this year their call for papers really resonated with the work that CLIC (Cardiff Libraries in Co-operation) does, and so in conjunction with Kristine Chapman from National Museum Wales I put in a proposal which was accepted.

The theme for the conference was ‘Together we are stronger’ and focussed on looking at opportunities for partnership and collaborative working. Collaboration could be between different sectors, within the same sector, between new and experienced practitioners, or working with academics, for example.

The event was held at a conference centre in Birmingham, and as to be expected from the theme, attracted attendees who were a mixture of new and experienced library and information professionals, and who worked in many different sectors. Librarians from the health sector were particularly prominent, alongside many from the usual higher education sector.

The conference was a mixture of plenary and parallel sessions; though with such a tight coalescing theme it felt a shame to have to miss sessions, as all sounded particularly relevant and interesting. The key note speaker for the day was Liz Jolly from the University of Teeside. Her presentation was entitled: ‘Developing our community of practice: learning together for a stronger profession’ and emphasised that professional practice needs to be underpinned by learning and research. She believes that we should all be life long learners and reflective practitioners; and noted that the more senior one gets one should still remember to ‘give back’ to the profession. Other tips she gave included the idea of networking with people who are different from you, and embracing a combination of continuity and change.

The first parallel session looked at ‘Sharing knowledge and experience’ and I chose to attend ‘Producing the evidence for effective evidence-based librarianship’ by Karen Davies (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). She introduced the topic of evidence-based librarianship (EBL) by explaining that in many ways it had emerged from the concept of evidence-based medicine – something which I expect all the health librarians were aware of, but which many others weren’t.

EBL is about looking at the best level evidence to inform decision making practice in librarianship. We should also critically evaluate and appraise the evidence we have.

If we can’t immediately find any relevant evidence we should try looking outside the traditional LIS area, for instance education, management, and marketing are three areas where we might find comparative research or ideas which could be applied to librarianship. If we need to carry out the research ourselves it is also worth considering collaboration – with someone from a different library, a different institution, or someone who isn’t working in a traditional LIS role (ie look again to education, management etc). You may want to utilise a student (someone who wishes to do some research for their dissertation), though be aware that their aims may differ from your own, and it is always worth consulting with their supervisor about the project. Even if you are doing the research yourself consider contacting a possible mentor, someone who is more used to the research process than you might be, and who can perhaps cast a more critical eye over your prospective survey or research plan, and offer you advice.

The next session was on the ‘Wider professional outlook’, and as one speaker had had to cancel we were all able to attend the presentation by Patricia Lacey (Dudley PCT) & Emma Gibbs on: ‘Developing your own skills network’ . Their talk was about the West Midlands Health Libraries Network which has a learning and development group who put on one day ‘Knowledge sharing’ events (ie staff development/training days). They have a wide pool of hospital libraries based in the West Midland, and are able to utilise a variety of staff to run these event, with sponsorship to cover refreshments and venues. They also have job shadowing opportunities available on their website – this is a list of libraries that are willing to participate, individuals make contact and arrange placement themselves. In addition to the main Knowledge sharing events they also have a paraprofessionals group which focuses on training that is practical for the job.

The following session was the first of the ‘Collaboration & partnership’ sessions, and I attended the ‘Collaboration to show impact of information sharing skills training’ by Stephen Ayre (George Elliot Hospital NHS Trust). His presentation was about a collaboration of NHS libraries in England (mainly Midlands) who have pooled together to create an impact survey which can be used across all participating libraries to create a larger pool of evidence. They have been looking at the impact of education training on NHS staff, based on the Kirkpatrick Hierarchy; and have developed an impact assessment tool.

The second of the ‘Collaboration & partnership’ was where myself and Kristine gave our presentation on CLIC and highlighted the benefits of cross-sectoral staff development events.

In the third and final session I listened to Rebecca Dorsett (Royal United Hospital Bath) talking about: ‘Shelving together: collaborative working through different library environments’. Her key message seemed to be that we should be aware of different practices in different sectors that could be used cross-sector. With her top tips being that we should explore other library environments, be willing to share resources, and work together to create unique projects.

In addition to these presentations there was also a workshop session, and an update on the CILIP future skills project. Overall it was a very interesting conference and left me with plenty to think about. I will certainly watch out for CDG events in the future.

In case you hadn’t noticed CPD23, the online professional development course for library and information professionals started running again a couple of weeks ago. Although I completed the course last year, and got my certificate (hurrah!), last week I found myself revisiting the course in spirit, if not quite in practice. The Cardiff Libraries in Co-operation (CLIC) staff development group that I am involved with has decided that we would like to try and support staff in our local area who are working through cpd23. To do this we are aiming to run a number of sessions ranging from simple meet-ups to perhaps some practical events where participants can get some help on areas they are struggling with. Our first meet-up took place last Wednedsay evening in a bar in Cardiff (no, not a yurt this time) and was organised by @KrisWJ with details placed on her blog Taking for Binding .

We had a range of people turning up – some had completed the course last year, some had started last year but got stuck, some were thinking about starting the course this year, and some just came to meet up and have a drink with other information professionals. The bar had 2 for 1 cocktails on offer, and pretty soon most of us were indulging!

Lack of time seems to be the biggest hurdle for most people, both in terms of preventing them from starting, and also for holding them up, and preventing them from finishing. I talked to the few people who had finished the course last year to see how they had managed, and this is what I found.

One person did most of the course at home.

One person did most of the course at work – due to their institution having a generous staff development policy which gave them study time they could use.

One person did most of the course at work – but in the lunch hour.

If you are lucky enough to have an institution that will support your professional development by allowing study time, then go for it! I think most of us, however, will not have that kind of generosity shown to us. At our meet up there was a group of people from one library who had started last year, and they initially all stayed behind after work one day a week to work on the course. Giving themselves time to do it, but also being able to support one another, which can be really beneficial. I think the answer to the time question is, if you really want to do the course you will find time – whether this means staying behind at work at the end of the day (or coming in early), doing it in your lunch hour, or doing it at home. Not everyone’s situation will allow for this, I realise, but you might be able to flexible elsewhere. One of the main driving forces, especially towards the end of the course, was the thought of getting a certificate!

To be completely honest, with cocktails in hand, we probably didn’t talk about CPD23 all that much! Not as a big group anyway, apart from establishing who we were, and where we were up to; but there were lots of other, smaller, conversations going on that night, and I think everyone enjoyed the chance to get together, and will look forward to the next time.

Strangely enough, the very next day I spoke at the CILIP Cymru conference about CPD23 and my experience. It is probably the first conference where I have actually been invited to speak, so I was very excited (nervous); even though it was essentially a re-run of the presentation I gave at the CLIC Social Media event last November. It seemed to go well (I was in the same session as Jo Alcock, who was fantastic), and I’ve heard comments that there were people in the audience who hadn’t heard about CPD23 until my talk, and were going to go and check it out afterwards (so hopefully I helped ‘convert’ a few new recruits).

I will probably keep an eye on the CPD23 blog to see how things are going, and it might encourage me to revisit a few areas where I had problems last year. I know one person who, even though they completed the course last year, is going to do it all again this year as she felt there were some areas that she didn’t focus on properly. Now that is dedication!

So, we come to the afternoon session of the ‘Conversations with Cataloguers in Wales’ event. For this final session we had two speakers, and then a discussion slot. The first of our two speakers, Elly Cope, was sadly unable to be with us due to illness, however she did send her presentation and notes and so, using myself as a stand-in, we were able to hear her talk by proxy.

From UDC to DDC: reclassification at the University of Bath was the third of our papers looking at a reclassification project. This project had started in 2009, and was still ongoing – in fact there was mention that there was possibly another 17 years to go before it was completed! The hierarchy of the library service at Bath was explained, and it was shown that the project was very Academic Services driven, whilst the Cataloguing team’s involvement grew along the way. The background to classification at Bath showed that it was traditionally done by the Academic Services staff rather than Technical Services. They had an interesting story (possibly just a rumour!) that UDC was adopted by the first librarian after the Second World War because it was too expensive to buy things in from America and they couldn’t afford the Dewey schedules; thus UDC was seen as similar and cheaper. Over the intervening years the system of amending or updating had become very haphazard and at the start of the project they had 35 different classification variants in use. A task group was set up to review the problems and suggest a methodology of tackling the problem; this included looking at the possibility of out-sourcing the classification. They proposed that Dewey should be introduced across the whole library, and to use the Coutts shelf-ready service for new books. In 2009 a pilot project was run on the 720s (Architecture), an area identified as having received a lot of complaints in the past. The pilot took 22 weeks and 6,768 items were reclassified. As it was deemed successful they decided to extend it to some other subject areas; however they also decided not to use the shelf-ready services and thus the cataloguing team were responsible for down-loading records and Dewey numbers. In 2010 Management books had been added to the list of subjects being converted and there was a noticable increase in workload and some demoralisation issues (seeing new books come in as UDC and yet knowing at some point they would have to be redone). The decision was made for all new material to be classified as Dewey, with the faculty librarians being responsibile for the previous editions retro-conversions. Each summer there is targeted retro-conversion project, and with more procedures becoming embedded, and every item that passes through the workroom being ‘Deweyfied’ it is hoped that the project may speed up a bit (and not take the 17 years as predicted!)

The final presentation for the day came from Jemma Francis and was entitled Capturing & archiving Welsh government publications. Jemma works for the Welsh Government where her role includes managing the Library management system, overseeing cataloguing and managing the publications archive which has all new Welsh Government publications added to it. To capture the publications for cataloguing she needs to search the corporate website, as well as relying on colleagues for alerts about new publications, plus receiving copies of circulars and notices via distribution lists. All these items are catalogued and there are currently 30,000 publications on the library catalogue. The library is also involved in an archive scanning project at present, aiming to make resources more accessible – both internally, and to the public in general. They have a project team who have 30,000 items to scan, at least a third of which are not already on the catalogue.

To finish off the day we had a discussion session, which Stuart Hunt, the chair of CILIP’s Cataloguing & Indexing Group (CIG) facilitated for us. As was perhaps to be expected, having a room full of over 40 cataloguers and inviting them to join in a discussion, did lead to quite a lot of silent moments! By nature cataloguers are often relatively introverted individuals (well, that is the stereotype, and we didn’t do much to alter that view!). Stuart talked about CIG and how it worked, what it does for its members, and also how CIG Scotland functions. The aim of our discussion was to see if there was a desire to form some kind of all Wales cataloguing group or forum, whether this be affiliated to CILIP, and be CIG Wales, or whether a stand alone group. The general consensus seemed to be that, yes, we would like to have some kind of group – there was even a general feeling that becoming CIG Wales would be a good thing. However, with a show of hands we demonstrated that only a relatively small percentage of people at the event were CILIP members. Stuart pointed out that it was possible for people to join the Cataloguing & Indexing Group without being members of CILIP (pay a smaller membership fee of £30 to CIG rather than main CILIP membership), and then if individuals lived in Wales they would automatically become members of CIG Wales. The only proviso being that the elected committee members (chair, treasurer, secretary) of CIG Wales would have to be CILIP members, but if we wanted any other committee members in addition to these three that would be fine (and they wouldn’t necessarily have to belong to CILIP).

It is very difficult to make these kind of decisions in a large group, and for the time being we felt that we could go away and think about things, and take up the discussion in a different space – on an online forum for example, or an email list or a wiki. If we were to have some kind of group we would also need to decide what we wanted out of it – would it be easier as a group to put on practical sessions? Even if we weren’t CIG Wales we could still liaise with CIG to arrange training sessions.

With this in mind I have set up a wiki on pbworks as an initial space to start discussions http://cataloguersinwales.pbworks.com/ I admit I am pretty much a novice at setting up/using wikis so if it looks a bit rough and ready, and you think it needs more adding – then it probably does (well, please let me know/give advice!). But please do join in the discussion (especially in you live/work in Wales).

After a comfort break the event continued and the second session of the day started with myself (Karen Pierce) and Ken Gibb talking about Discovering hidden gems: cataloguing the Cardiff Rare Books Collection. Cardiff University (CU) acquired the collection in 2010 by purchasing it from Cardiff Public Library with financial assistance from the National Assembly for Wales. The background to the collection, and how it came to be built up by the public library in the days when they were hoping to establish a National Library in Cardiff (they lost out to Aberystwyth) was explained. When the public library put the collection up for sale this provoked a national campaign to attempt to keep the books in Cardiff, or in Wales in general. There were many discussions and eventually the Heritage Minister intervened and the University was helped to acquire the collection. Whilst negotiations were taking place a 10 % scoping report was commissioned, and this was undertaken by three cataloguers from CU. As well as noting author, date and title, we looked at marginalia, provenance, physical condition, and subject matter. A report was produced for CyMAL. Subsequently, phase 2 of the project lead to creating a spreadsheet of all 14,000 items prior to the sale. Once the books were purchased, they needed cataloguing. Our cataloguing team didn’t have the necessary expertise, but we were able to get funding for a (3 year) Rare books cataloguer who joined us in the summer of 2011. Ken (the person appointed!) undertook a 1% project to get an idea of how long it was going to take to catalogue the various subsections of books, and to establish the rules we would be using (DCRM(B), etc). We believe that about 40% of the collection has provenance information, and our most exciting (provenance) find so far is the signature of John Dee (the Elizabethan astronomer and mathematician) in a copy of Thomas Aquinas. Although still at an early stage in the project we have also found two volumes bound in 1597 for Pietro Duodo the Venetian ambassador to the King of France. Additionally we have a copy of Dickens’ Christmas Carol bound in translucent vellum inlaid with mother of pearl; this rare style of binding was developed by the binder Cedric Chivers and won him a gold medal at the St. Louis Worlds Fair in 1907. We also have a near complete collection of books published by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, including a uniquely embroidered copy of The Floure and the Leaf.

The next presentation was by Kristine Chapman & Louise Carey talking about Cataloguing art books at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales. The National Museum Wales has seven sites, and have collections covering art, history, science and archaeology. The library was set up in 1914, and moved to purpose built premises in the 1920s, but has outgrown its space, resulting in book collections also being kept in curatorial departments. The art library contains a variety of material, from monographs on artists, to exhibition catalogues. Although predominantly it is the Museum staff who use the library, it is also used by students and researchers too. There is a trust system for loans as the library is unmanned, and slips are placed on the shelf where the item has been taken from. The classification system used in the art library is the Metropolitan Museum of Art system which was first published in 1911. The MMA itself switched to Library of Congress in 2002, and thus it is a system that isn’t being updated. It is more in depth than Dewey for art, and is much better for exhibition catalogues; and for the Museum’s purposes it fits better with their spatial idiosyncrasies. Unsurprisingly it is not that well known, so new staff are unfamiliar with its format, and inconsistancies can creep in; in addition, as it hasn’t been updated there are outdated geographical areas, and no keep up with technoligical advances. Monographs are shelved by artist (or predominant artist where more than one featured), and exhibition catalogues by location and gallery. Sometimes multiple copies of an item are shelved at different places depending on what the book focuses on, for instance an exhibition catalogue containing works of Gwen John (painter) and Lucie Rie (ceramic artist) is shelved in the ceramics collection, and under Gwen John monographs. They are happy using the MMA system as it works well for the space their collection is in (which is pretty full!).

The final presentation for the morning was on a topic that most of us were probably unfamiliar with. Miranda Morton’s talk, entitled Term Cymru: how do you say “Twitter” in Welsh? was about her work as a terminologist at the Welsh Government, where the two languages of Wales (Welsh and English) have to be treated equally. As part of the translation service her work involves translating statutory guidelines and legislation into Welsh. Within the European Union Welsh is not one of the 23 official languages, but is recognised as a co-official language – thus material from the EU isn’t published in Welsh, but if a query was posed in Welsh, a Welsh reply would be given. As an example of how busy they are, the translation service provided 4,266 written translations in a 6 month period, with an average of 2,000 words per day per translator. With tight deadlines and a number of translators, and material being required for different purposes, there can be problems with consistancy. Additionally, there can be ambiguity over terminology, specialist definitions for different sectors, and the use of colloquial terms in campaigns, which can all mean problems for the translators. In 2004 a means to combat these problems was established with the setting up of Term Cymru. A free resource, which is also available to the public, it is essentially a database of terminology with contextual explanations for some terms, and subject tags. With 49,000 records to date it is due for some weeding and streamlining, but it is an extremely useful tool for standardising government terminology in Enlgish/Welsh.

After our stimulating morning we stopped for lunch, and many informal and interesting discussions took place in this break.